DRW Interview Questions
The real DRW quant-interview problems candidates report — expected value, probability and coding — each with a full worked solution.
Inside the DRW interview
DRW is a Chicago-based proprietary trading firm spanning options market-making and systematic strategies. Its interviews emphasize expected value and probability, with a coding strand and trading-flavored game-theory and finance questions.
What they test
The largest block is expectation, backed by probability — fair-value of a bet, conditional updates, and optimal-stopping puzzles that mirror sizing a trade. Around them sit coding (algorithmic / streaming-style problems), game theory (bidding and adversarial play), and a small but pointed finance and regression core touching options intuition and fitting signal to noise.
The recurring shapes
Many prompts reduce to one number: the expected payoff of a game, and whether it's worth taking at a given price. Condition on the first outcome, weight by probability, and compare against your cost. The regression and finance questions probe whether you understand variance, fit, and convexity rather than memorized formulas.
How to approach
Reason out loud and quote a price you'd actually trade on. Lean on linearity of expectation and symmetry first, set up a recursion for the stopping and game problems, and check small cases and limits. For coding, narrate the one-pass or streaming invariant before writing it; for the finance and regression questions, derive from first principles.
The mix is medium-heavy — 4 easy, 17 medium, 6 hard — so spend less time on warm-ups and more on the multi-step expectation, game-theory, and coding problems where the hard tail lives.
DRW expected value questions (8)
- Expected Number of Chord Intersections Inside a Circle
- Integral of a Binary Expansion Transformation
- Optimal Number of Auction Bidders
- Expected Value of Bills Drawn Without Replacement
- Expected Absolute Difference of Two Dice
- Expected Value of an Optimal Stopping Card Game
- Repeated Dice Game with Matching Stops
- Gamma Function Ratio via the Reduction Property
DRW probability questions (5)
DRW coding questions (4)
DRW game theory questions (3)
DRW finance questions (2)
DRW regression questions (2)
DRW options pricing questions (2)
DRW random variables questions (1)
DRW interview FAQ
What kind of questions does DRW ask in quant interviews?
Candidates most often report expected value, probability and coding questions. This page collects 27 of them, 27 stamped with the month they were last reported — each with a full worked solution.
How hard are DRW interview questions?
The set spans 4 easy, 17 medium and 6 hard problems. Most sit at medium difficulty — solvable in a few minutes with clean reasoning — with a harder tail that rewards knowing the canonical tricks.
How do I prepare for the DRW quant interview?
Work through this set by topic (use the sidebar), starting from your weakest area. 5 problems are free to open with their full solution, so you can judge the quality before anything else. Then walk the full DRW interview guide for the round-by-round funnel and the online assessment.
Are these the actual DRW interview questions?
They are built from candidate-reported DRW questions. We rewrite each prompt for clarity and author the worked solutions ourselves — we don't claim the wording is verbatim, and we never invent questions or recycle generic lists. 27 of 27 carry the month they were last reported.